I suspect a large contingent here will really hate this suggestion but here it goes:
The McPhee method sounds like a great framework for making writing prompts. THat is, prompts for LLMs to write things.
>in stage one he accumulates notes; in stage two he selects them; in stage three he structures them; and in stage four he writes. By the time he is crafting sentences the structure of the piece as a whole, and of each section, even paragraph, and the logic connecting them all, is already determined, thanks to the mechanical work done in the first three stages. McPhee is on rails the whole time he writes his first draft. From there it’s all downhill and the standard thing that everybody does: revision, revision again, then refinement—a sculptor with ax, then knife, then scalpel.
If there were another writer of non-fiction as deeply researched I'd compare McPhee to, it would be Robert Caro. I already knew from Caro's memoir Working that Caro did not use a tape recorder in his interviews with subjects, and from this article about McPhee's method, I learned that McPhee does not either. I'm a bit surprised: I'd have thought for such deep research one would want a recording to refer back to, but both seem to feel that the drawbacks of influencing their subjects outweigh their benefit.
Basically: Don't crystallize too early, have a primordial soup of notes that you coagulate/congeal bit by bit. Take little iterative steps on local slices, don't try to construct the final product from the get-go.
This method came quite naturally to me during my writing-based personal projects since I have no deadline or anything and am literally just collecting thousands of little A6/A7 notes that I capture as they pop into my head. I can take all the time I want to stew on them and have a structure bubbling up all on its own.
I suppose some of the beauty of this is that the "notes" are easy. Whereas writing is hard. So the more you can leverage these fragments, the better.
I wonder how the non-fiction element plays into it. I guess if you have a lot of fragments the hard part is organizing and then glueing them together. But in non fiction a lot of this is done or you. You are given the order and a lot of the glue. The glue you are missing is probably relatively obvious ("why did they do this?") and you can get that information and include it, or you cant and there is nothing to be done about it ("the motive is unknown" etc).
Whereas in fiction these are all unknown. You have to decide. And you have to make it compelling, and believable, and maybe astonishing and otherworldly at the same time.
In some limited experience in fictional writing, this is the hard part. I have all these fragments (this happened, this happens, there is this dynamic with 2 characters, some broad themes I want to hit on, etc). Makes me think about if non-fiction stories could be used as a sort of "seed" for the glue. I feel like the content is pretty highly coupled to that sort of pattern though.
This is about journalism, in an age when journalism is being bulldozed by cheap content, AI hallucinations and other clickbait tactics. Journalism still has the idea of finding facts, things that correspond to something in reality.
It’s been shown that people in fact prefer to have their beliefs confirmed, rather than challenged by investigative reporting, hence the decline in real journalism, because it is both more difficult and in the end less popular across a large audience.
> McPhee usually had one person at the center of each piece, so he would aim to spend a lot of time with that person … stay at their cottage for a season
Even back when every household received a morning paper I cannot fathom how a single article could command such a high pay.
For a magazine like the New Yorker, there was money. You might be interested in Bryan Burrough's experience writing for Vanity Fair in the 90s and 2000s.
> For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin.
https://yalereview.org/article/burrough-vanity-fair-graydon-...
> Even back when every household received a morning paper I cannot fathom how a single article could command such a high pay.
He wrote for the New Yorker, which is a magazine rather than a newspaper. The number of long-form literary nonfiction pieces that the New Yorker runs every year is drastically fewer than the number of news articles produced to fill a daily newspaper in just a couple weeks.
This is a well-written, interesting article. The only issue I have is with this:
> He said, if you tell someone you’re a journalist they’re going to believe you. Your job is to honor their trust.
Sadly, that is no longer true. Today's "journalists" far too often see their job as proselytizing rather than reporting.
McPhee was recommended as someone whose writing "makes boring things interesting". I did enjoy The Curve of Binding Energy (nuclear science) and to some extent Coming out of the Country (Alaska). Both of those featured interesting vignettes and colorful characters which propelled along the narrative.
However, I then turned to his magnum opus on geology, Annals of the Former World. That was a long slog which, although I enjoyed moments of it, now I wonder if my time wouldn't have been better spent reading something more interesting.
For me, it’s "The Pine Barrens". It’s boring, but he did make it interesting. For a while, at least.
Sharing a critical opinion? That's a downvote for you! (Sheesh)
"McPhee has been my model. He's the most elegant of all the journalists writing today, I think."
— Tracy Kidder, author of The Soul of a New Machine and many other great writings.
John McPhee is a treasure. If you haven't read any of his work, I would. And if you don't want to dive into a full book, he has a number of collections of short stories.
This approach sounds very similar to the construction of grounded theory in ethnography/anthropology -- something I've always wanted to practise but never had the patience for!
This is a beautiful website. The article and homepage.
I absolutely loved this:
> if you tell someone you’re a journalist they’re going to believe you. Your job is to honor their trust.